The smallest of the Dominican internet providers Tricom, has concluded a deal with China based Huawei to upgrade their services to the new 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution). LTE is a trademark of ETSI

This announcement follows the announcement on June 6th that Telecom is planning to invest more than $125 million USD in upgrades tho ther fiber optic coverage with about $40 million USD to be invested in the next year. This would move the network up to a bandwith capacity of 1GH (Gigahertz).

So far the major emphisis is in the usual larger markets of the National District, Santo Domingo East and West, San Pedro de Macoris and La Romana. Future services upgrades are planned for Santiago, La Vega, Bonao and the San Francisco area.

The upgrades are part of the new product push called “Internet Max” that takes advantage of internet speed up to 100MB using an infrastructure of hybrid fiber optic network (HFC)

Here is a look at the Current Tricom plans as per www.tricom.net.

  1. 1Mbs / 256Kbps – RD $ 699
  2. 2 Mbs / 512 Kbps – RD $ 995
  3. 3Mbs / 768 Kbps – RD $ 1.350
  4. 4Mbs / 768Kbps – RD $ 1.850
  5. 5Mbs / 768 Kbps – RD $ 2.350
  6. 6Mbs / 768 Kbps – RD $ 2.850
  7. 10 Mbs / 1 Mbs – RD $ 4.950
  8. 20Mbs / 1 Mbs – RD $ 9.950
  9. 30Mbs / 1 Mbs – RD $ 13.450
  10. 50Mbs / 2 Mbs – RD $ 18.995
  11. 100Mbs / 5 Mbs – RD $ 28.500

Currently the 100MB speeds are only available in the central area of Santo Domingo with outlining areas of Santo Domingo reaching up to 20MB. La Romana and San Pedro clock in with a max download speed of 10MB.

Last year Tricom signed an agreement with Google to provide Googles communications services, messaging and collaboration platform Google Apps to Tricom customers. Google Apps allows users to keep a virtual desktop storing and creating files over the internet instead of on the client computer.

As internet speed progress with upgrades like 4G LTE using online apps like Google App will start to become more and more convenient allowing users to access their documents from any internet enabled computer or device.